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100Setting aside, just for a moment, his general loathsomeness, there is a case to be made for a less apparent aspect of Benito Mussolini: He was once really hot.
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100Vincere, though, is the veteran director's stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema.
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100It's a thrilling, at times brilliant piece of staging that never forgets the emotional pull of either the tragic personal tale or the ramifications of history.
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100An amazing, galvanic experience. It's about the hushed-up story of Benito Mussolini's first wife and child, but no one will ever mistake this movie for a standard biopic. It's too raw, too primal.
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95Vincere, which comes as close to grand opera as can be achieved without anyone actually bursting into song, feels like a big movie -- handsomely mounted, full of dark shadows counterpointed with stray shafts of light, with dramatic close-ups of faces driven by passion and madness and heavy silences brutally interrupted by clashing tympani.
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91Mezzogiorno (Love in the Time of Cholera) plays Dalser with the kind of fervent intensity once seen in silent films.
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90Well, if you care about movies, I'm telling you to carve out time for Vincere, a strange and powerful blend of historical fact and dreamlike imagination that captures both the charisma and the murderous madness of the young Benito Mussolini.
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90The movie, a near-masterpiece, is a monument to intoxication: of sexual conquest, of military conquest, and, most of all, of cinema.
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90A sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film.
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89A gripping presentation of a little-known true story and its historical lessons.
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88The film is beautifully well-mounted. The locations, the sets, the costumes, everything conspire to re-create the Rome of that time. It provides a counterpoint to the usual caricature of Mussolini. They say that behind every great man there stands a great woman. In Mussolini's case, his treatment of her was a rehearsal for how he would treat Italy.
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88A gorgeous operatic tale of obsession and madness.
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88Vincere, which translates as the battle cry "Win!" is like invisible ink on the ledger of war, a secret record of love and loss.
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83Vincere starts to run dry of stunning visual gambits and become redundant in its second hour, as the madhouse sequences dominate, but Bellocchio's central premise retains its power and poignancy throughout.
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The director also pulls career-high performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi that are, respectively, tragic and mesmerizing.
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80Almost as an afterthought to the ringingly true performances--and Marco Bellocchio's unusually approachable direction--comes a deft analysis of fascism, likened to lovesickness, insanity and a gust of orchestral strings. It's all of that and more, not to mention a lousy matchmaker.
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80Bellocchio gets the opera-buffa and the carnival side of Italian Fascism, and parts of the movie are excruciatingly funny.
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75Daniele Cipri's highly stylized lensing and Carlo Crivelli's bold score add to the movie's flamboyant aura. But then, the story of a bombastic dictator deserves a bombastic telling.
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75What this uncaring man is doing to her (Ida), he's about to do to a nation of 50 million people. And all of them will hate themselves in the morning.
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75Vincere is Ida's story, but it says as much about fascist Italy and its ruler as it does about the central character.
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70Though Ida's life would become a torturous hell spent locked away in an insane asylum, the legacy left by her letters has made for an intense and intriguing, if at times uneven, film with Italian director Marco Bellocchio wringing every drop of emotion out of his actors and his audience before it is over.
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63If you appreciate historical melodrama, you could do worse than Vincere.
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60There's visual poetry here and haunted performances from Mezzogiorno and Timi -- who plays two roles, and is especially gripping as Dalser's grown son.
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60Forty-four years after his exciting debut feature "Fists in the Pocket," Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio continues his late-career renaissance with the passionate, beautifully crafted, period melodrama Vincere.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 3
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Mixed: 0 out of 3
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Negative: 1 out of 3
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HuguesF.10
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JaneG.2Dark, impossibly dark, dreary and not worth the trouble. All the critics loved this but very disappointing.